Post-Phenomenological Perspectives in Human Geography
Summary
Post-phenomenological perspectives in human geography build upon classical phenomenology’s attention to lived experience and intentionality by foregrounding the entanglement of human subjects, more-than-human actors and material-technological assemblages. Rather than treating space and place as pre-given backdrops for human action, this approach views them as co-constituted through ongoing relations among bodies, objects, technologies and environments. Researchers examine how sensory perception, embodied practice and technological mediation shape spatial knowledges and social worlds. Central concerns include the performativity of place memories, the co-presence of humans and non-humans in landscapes, and the ways in which digital or infrastructural technologies refract our lived encounters with place. By decentring the human subject and embracing multiplicity and emergence, post-phenomenological geography offers nuanced accounts of phenomena such as climate sense-making, trail-building ecologies, and tourism encounters, with broad implications for environmental governance, heritage practice and everyday mobility.
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Post-Phenomenological Perspectives in Human Geography publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in post-phenomenological perspectives in human geography across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Post-phenomenology: An approach that extends phenomenology by emphasising the co-constitution of human experience with technologies, non-human actors and material environments.
Intentionality: The phenomenological concept that consciousness is always directed towards objects, places or phenomena, shaping how these are perceived and experienced.
Relational ontology: A viewpoint that entities and spaces do not pre-exist as fixed essences but emerge through networks of relations among human, non-human and material actants.
Assemblage: A theoretical construct denoting a dynamic configuration of heterogeneous elements—social, material and technological—that together produce specific spatial or social phenomena.
References
- Entangled phenomenologies: Reassessing (post-)phenomenology’s promise for human geography. Progress in Human Geography (2021).
- Spectres of Nature in the Trail Building Assemblage. International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure (2019).
- Finding one place in another: post/phenomenology, memory and déjà vu. Social & Cultural Geography (2021).
- The Spaces and Places of the Tourism Encounter. On Re-Centring the Human in a More-Than/Non-Human World. Humanities (2023).
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